Saturday, October 11, 2014

Top ten fairytales

Marina Warner's award-winning studies of mythology and fairy tales include Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary, Stranger Magic: Charmed States & the Arabian Nights, From the Beast to the Blonde - on Fairy Tales and their Tellers, Monuments & Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form, and No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling and Making Mock. Her Clarendon Lectures Fantastic Metamorphoses; Other Worlds were published in 2001; her essays on literature and culture were collected in Signs & Wonders, and Phantasmagoria, a study of spirits and technology.

Her new book is Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale.

At The Guardian, Warner tagged her ten top fairytales, including:
Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie

A fabulous comic quest story starring a child hero, this novella was written in hiding after the fatwa. Like many fairytales over their long tradition, its works as a happy adventure story and as a pointed political allegory about the silencing of dissent, the horrors of despotism and the joylessness that follows them. It epitomises the capacity of fairytales to “cross over”, and speaks to the times more vividly and more necessarily than ever.
Read about the other entries on the list.

Haroun and the Sea of Stories is a book that made a difference to Josh Brolin.

--Marshal Zeringue